Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Lawrence Krauss’s
book A Universe from Nothing managed
something few thought possible -- to outdo Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in sheer intellectual
frivolousness. Nor was my First Things review of the book by
any means the only one to call attention to its painfully evident foibles. Many commentators with no theological ax to
grind -- such as David Albert, Massimo
Pigliucci, Brian
Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry
Coyne -- slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy. Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be
atheist provocateurs: When evenJerry
Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time
to throw in the towel. Causa finita est. Game over.
Shut the hell up already.

But Krauss
likes nothing so much as the sound of his own voice, even when he’s got nothing
of interest to say. A friend calls my
attention to a recent
Australian television appearance in which Krauss, his arrogance as undiminished
as his cluelessness, commits the same puerile fallacies friends and enemies
alike have been calling him out on for over a year now. Is there any point in flogging a horse by now
so far past dead that even the Brits wouldn’t
make a lasagna out of him? There is,
so long as there’s still even one hapless reader who somehow mistakes this wan
ghost for Bucephalus.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

UC Berkeley
philosopher (and atheist)
Alva Noë is, as
we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics
of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. In a
recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s
book, focusing on the question of the origin of life. Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of
biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how
species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how
life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say,
due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago. Our problem isn't merely historical in nature,
that is. If that were all that was at
stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life
in a test tube. But we can't do that. We don't know how.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Back from Oxford,
and exhausted. I thank Bill Carroll and
the Dominicans at Blackfriars for their warm hospitality. (And thanks to Brother James of Blackfriars
for taking the photo, elsewhere in Oxford.) Regular blogging
will resume ASAP.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a
variety of anti-realism, which is in
turn typically contrasted with realist
and reductionist positions. A realist account of some phenomenon takes it
to be both real and essentially what it appears to be. A reductionist account of some phenomenon
takes it to be real but not what it appears to be. An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would
take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our
account of the world altogether. Instrumentalism is a milder version of
anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is
not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

My article
“Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” appears in the latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Here is the abstract:

James
Ross developed a simple and powerful argument for the immateriality of the
intellect, an argument rooted in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition while
drawing on ideas from analytic philosophers Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, and
Nelson Goodman. This paper provides a
detailed exposition and defense of the argument, filling out aspects that Ross
left sketchy. In particular, it
elucidates the argument’s relationship to its Aristotelian-Scholastic and
analytic antecedents, and to Kripke’s work especially; and it responds to
objections or potential objections to be found in the work of contemporary
writers like Peter Dillard, Robert Pasnau, Brian Leftow, and Paul Churchland.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Recently
I’ve been reading Sean Howe’s terrific Marvel
Comics: The Untold Story. The
broad outlines of the history of the company -- its origins in 1939 as part of
Martin Goodman’s pulp magazine empire, its rise to dominance of the field beginning
in the 1960s under writer and editor Stan Lee and his co-creation (with Jack
Kirby, Steve Ditko, and other artists) of now famous characters like the Fantastic
Four, Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-Men, the company’s declaration of bankruptcy
in the 1990s, its rebound and recent incorporation into the Disney empire --
have been recounted before. But Howe’s
book gives us a wealth of fascinating details (fascinating not only from a
comic book geek point of view, but from a business point of view) that you
won’t easily find elsewhere.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Theist
philosopher William Lane Craig debated atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg at
Purdue University on February 1. You can
watch the debate here. I put forward my own detailed critique of
Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to
Reality in a ten-part series of posts, of which you can find a roundup here. As I’ve said before, one of Rosenberg’s
strengths is that he is willing consistently to follow out the implications of
scientism (however absurd and self-defeating, as we saw in the series of posts
just referred to) in a way many other atheists do not. Another is that, as this event indicates, he
has (as a certain other prominent atheist famously
appears not to have) the courage and intellectual honesty to debate the
most formidable defenders of theism.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.